Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Great Devourer

Today I found curled up in my mailbox my copy of Codex: Tyranids so I'm assuming that it got delivered on Tuesday, but I just didn't think to check in the regular mail... kinda thought it would be sent via FedEx or UPS to avoid this very thing. Instead it went by the regular USPS which goes a long way in my mind to explaining the delays in shipping. This has taught me an important lesson about GW's mail order service, which is to never order from them unless it's going to require them to ship in your items in a box. I'm optimistic that the book will flatten out with time, it's just an annoyance after all. Now begins the fun part of absorbing the new information and rules, then a whole new cycle number crunching and list building... yeah! Hooray for math!! Hooray for lists!!

I'm excited to see what type of army of I can put together and just maybe get in a few trial games with my brother. I never bought into the whole 'Nidzilla style of play that was so popular with the last edition, and even though I've heard that horde swarms are viable with the new Codex, I'm not convinced that my bugs are going to be that much better. I appreciate them lowering the points value of the little bugs, but it looks like everything else became more costly to take so I don't know really how much different Hive Fleet Hydra will function on the table. Nonetheless I'm looking forward to the process of learning how the army works now. So far the only thing that's jumped out at me as affecting the organization of my army is the change of Ravener broods increasing to a minimum size of three. My army has four Raveners groups into two groups of two each, but combining them is not possible within the restriction of WYSIWYG as the two broods are armed differently. I may just lump 'em together and count them all as being armed identically, it just won't sit well with me. Also some of the bio-morphs on other broods may cause some trouble too but those should be easier to either make use of or to simply ignore. We'll see... I'll probably start posting lists soon, as well as my thoughts on how the army has changed.

Yesterday I varnished the Dreadnought, successfully avoiding any final mishaps such as excessive shininess, and got the optics glossed and sparkling. Finished! Even though he took basically a month to do, I am still really happy with him and had lots of fun from beginning to end. I feel like I really pushed myself on this one to try new techniques and get the most out of my painting and modeling abilities. Still no camera though so I'll have to wait before I can show it off. I still think I can improve on the extreme highlighting but regardless of that I am quite pleased with my Brother Abraxos and expect great and heroic deeds from him. I'm now thinking about ordering some resin arms from ForgeWorld so as to take full advantage of having things magnetized. It's also been recommended to me that I look into getting a second Dreadnought, especially one equipped with a Multi-melta, so that I can run them in pairs. It makes sense to me as single Dreadnoughts have never seemed to perform particularly well for me, either getting immobilized or else having their arms blown off fairly early into the game. Oh, and also putting them in Drop Pods too... at this pace though all of that is going to have to wait until I get some higher priority units painted up. Time for some Troops!

Last night I got started on the Scouts squad and made more progress on them tonight so that all they need now are heads and whatever little bits I decide to add. I ran into a problem last night trying to figure out which legs needed to go with the various torsos, but I think I have come up with a solution that shouldn't be too labor intensive. Were I not going to see Avatar tomorrow during the day I would probably be able to start painting them tomorrow night. I expect therefore to complete their assembly and be ready to prime them on Friday so that I can begin painting them this weekend. Although I'd probably rather keep working on my minis than go see a movie, this is the first chance my wife and I have had to go out in many long months. She's really excited about Avatar, having heard all sorts of things about how spiritual it is or whatever, but I am not so thrilled which is weird considering how much of a geek I am for sci-fi and animation. I just don't want another sermonizing morality piece, especially one that is almost three hours long. Sorry but I just don't see James Cameron as much of an authority on these matters. Aliens is one of my favorite movies so maybe I'll be surprised, I'm just suspicious of all the hype.

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